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Thursday, May 10, 2012

Introducing...

Steve

I have to be honest, my name is not Steve. Nor is my nickname. Nor have I ever been called Steve (except by that one person who thought they recognized me and insisted on guessing my name). My name is not Steve but Steve is a part of me. Allow me to explain. During the years of Window's '98, I came to the realization that someone, somewhere was creating all the printed media that I enjoyed consuming. It was at that moment that imaginary Steve knocked on a door in my brain and said, "Hey! We could do that."

The early years

Being 13 years old and armed with MS Paint, Microsoft Word, and greeting card generating program I started designing graphics. The first, of course, was to be a logo in order to brand myself and have my masterpieces easily recognized. After hours of work spread over multiple days, the logo was complete. It was "STEVE'S STUDIO" in white Stop font angling slightly upward in the center of a 12-point blue star, giving the appearance of a casually placed sticker. It was perfect.

With the logo complete (and saved as a *.doc file) it was time to start building a portfolio. The question was, where to begin? Webdings would be the beginning. These glyphs were nice, but very boring in black and white. One-by-one I colourized the Webdings font. Which made for good practice of my next endeavor.

At the time the graphics on skateboards were very intriguing. Using the "Drawing" toolbar in Microsoft Word I created a to-scale outline of a skateboard which would serve as both my canvas and template for my first graphics. Sadly, these graphics were lost when that computer crashed.

With all my hard work gone, I hung up my graphic designer dreams and moved on to other things. Steve on the other hand, did not give up on the dream...he waited.

...

By the way, my real name is Byron.

Along with the continuation of the story of Steve, this blog will also contain how-to's, tips, tricks, and history revolving around my experience with and around technology.